Friend of Madame Maigret Read online

  “I tell you again I have no idea. By the way, have you ever heard of Countess Panetti?”

  “Who’s she?”

  “A very rich Italian woman who lived at Claridge’s.”

  “Has she been killed too?”

  “It’s possible, and it’s also possible that she’s simply away spending the carnival season at Cannes or Nice. I’ll know tonight. I’d like to take another look at your husband’s account books.”

  “Come this way. I’ve got loads of questions to ask you, but they’ve slipped my mind. It’s when you’re not here that I think of them. I ought to write them down like the young man playing detective.”

  She let him precede her upstairs, fetched from a shelf a big black book that the police had examined five or six times.

  At the very end an index contained the names of the bookbinder’s clients, old and new, in alphabetical order. The name Panetti was not listed. Neither was Krynker.

  Steuvels had tiny, jerky handwriting, with some letters overlapping others, a peculiar way of making the r’s and t’s.

  “You’ve never heard the name Krynker?”

  “Not that I remember. Look, we would be together the whole day, but I never assumed the right to ask him questions. Sometimes you seem to forget, chief inspector, that I’m not just an ordinary wife. Remember where he found me. His action has always amazed me. And now it suddenly occurs to me, as a result of our conversation, that the reason he did it may have been that he remembered what his mother had been.”

  Maigret, as if he were no longer listening, was striding toward the door, flinging it open and seizing Alfonsi by the collar of his camel-hair coat.

  “Come here, you. You’re at it again. Have you decided to spend your days dogging my heels?”

  The other man tried to brazen it out, but the chief inspector had a strong grip on the scruff of his neck, was shaking him like a puppet.

  “What are you doing here, just tell me that?”

  “I was waiting for you to leave.”

  “To come pestering this woman?”

  “I have a right to. Provided she chooses to receive me . . .”

  “What are you after?”

  “Ask Maître Liotard.”

  “Liotard or no Liotard, let me tell you one thing: if I catch you following me again, I’ll have you pinched for living off a prostitute, mark my words!”

  This wasn’t an empty threat. Maigret knew very well that the woman Alfonsi lived with spent most of her evenings in Montmartre nightclubs and that she was not unwilling to accompany visiting foreigners to their hotels.

  When he came back to Fernande, he looked relieved, and the figure of the ex-detective could be seen making off in the rain toward the place des Vosges.

  “What sort of questions does he ask you?”

  “Always the same. He wants to know what you ask me, what I’ve answered, what you’re interested in, what objects you’ve examined.”

  “I think he’ll let you alone in future.”

  “Do you think Maître Liotard is harming my husband?”

  “Whether he is or not, we can’t do anything about it at this point.”

  He had to go back downstairs, because he had left the photograph of Moss on the kitchen table. Instead of making for the Quai des Orfèvres, he crossed the street and entered the cobbler’s shop.

  The latter, at nine in the morning, already had several drinks under his belt and reeked of white wine.

  “Well, chief inspector, everything fine and dandy?”

  The two shops were exactly opposite one another. The cobbler and the bookbinder could not help seeing each other every time they raised their eyes, both hunched over their work, with only the width of the street between them.

  “Can you remember some of the bookbinder’s clients?”

  “A few, yes.”

  “This one?”

  He held the photograph under his nose, while Fernande, opposite, watched them anxiously.

  “I call him the clown.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I think he looks like a clown.”

  Suddenly he scratched his head, seemed to make a welcome discovery.

  “Look here, buy me a drink, and I’ll make it worth your while. It was a bit of good luck that you showed me that picture. I mentioned a clown and all of a sudden the word made me think of a suitcase. Why? But of course! Because clowns usually come into the ring with a suitcase.”

  “You mean the stooges, don’t you?”

  “Stooge or clown, it’s the same thing. How about the drink?”

  “Later.”

  “You don’t trust me? You’re wrong. Honest as a newborn babe, that’s what I always say. Well, anyhow, there’s no doubt that the fellow with the suitcase is your man.”

  “What fellow with the suitcase?”

  The cobbler gave him a wink that was meant to be knowing.

  “You’re not going to try any tricks with me, are you? I suppose I don’t read the papers, do I? Well, what were the papers concerned with, right at the start? Didn’t people come asking me whether I’d seen Frans go out with a suitcase, or his wife, or anyone else?”

  “And you did see the man in the photo go out with the suitcase?”

  “Not that day, anyhow, not that I noticed. But I’m thinking of the other times.”

  “Did he come here often?”

  “Yes, often.”

  “Once a week, for example? Or once a fortnight?”

  “Maybe. I don’t want to make anything up, because I know what a rough time the lawyers’ll give me if this ever comes up in court. He used to come here often that’s all I’m saying.”

  “In the morning? Afternoon?”

  “My answer to that is: the afternoon. Do you know why? Because I can remember seeing him when the lights were on, so it must have been afternoon. He always had a small suitcase with him.”

  “Brown?”

  “Probably. Aren’t most suitcases brown? He would sit down in a corner of the workshop, waiting for the job to be finished, and he’d leave again with the suitcase.”

  “Did that take long?”

  “I don’t know. More than an hour in any case. Sometimes it seemed to me that he stayed the whole afternoon.”

  “Did he always come on the same day?”

  “I can’t tell you that either.”

  “Think before you answer. Did you ever see this man in the studio at the same time as Madame Steuvels?”

  “At the same time as Fernande? Wait. I can’t call it to mind. Once, at least, the two men went out together, and Frans closed his shop.”

  “Recently?”

  “I’ll have to think. When are we going to have that drink?”

  Maigret had no alternative but to follow him to the Grand Turenne, where the cobbler assumed a triumphant manner.

  “Two old marcs. On the chief inspector!”

  He drank three, one after another, and was trying to start telling about the clown all over again by the time Maigret managed to get rid of him. When he passed the bookbinder’s workshop, Fernande was watching him, through the glass door, with an air of reproach.

  But he had to keep on with his job to the end. He entered the concierge’s lodge, where she was busy peeling potatoes.

  “Well! So you’re around again!” she observed tartly, offended at having been neglected for so long.

  “Do you know this man?”

  She went to fetch her glasses from the drawer.

  “I don’t know his name, if that’s what you mean, but I’ve seen him before. Didn’t the cobbler give you the information?”

  She was jealous because other people had been questioned first.

  “Have you seen him often?”

  “I’ve seen him, that’s all I know.”

  “Was he a client of the bookbinder?”

  “I suppose so, seeing he came to his shop.”

  “He didn’t come on any other occasion?”

  “I t
hink he occasionally came to dinner with them, but I pay so little attention to my tenants!”

  The stationer across the street, the cardboard manufacturer, the umbrella seller, in short, the routine, always the same question, the same gesture, the picture, which people examined gravely. Some hesitated. Others had seen the man without remembering where or in what circumstances.

  Just as he was leaving the neighborhood, Maigret had an impulse to push open the door of the Tabac des Vosges one last time.

  “Have you ever seen that mug before, patron?”

  The barkeeper did not hesitate.

  “The man with the suitcase!” he said.

  “Explain.”

  “I don’t know what he sells, but he must be a door-to-door salesman. He used to come in quite often, always a little while after lunch. He’d drink strawberry syrup with Vichy water and he explained to me that he had a stomach ulcer.”

  “Would he stay long?”

  “Sometimes a quarter of an hour, sometimes longer. Look, he always sat there, near the door.”

  From where you could keep an eye on the corner of the rue de Turenne!

  “He must have been waiting till it was time for an appointment with a customer. Once, not so long ago, he stayed almost an hour and finally asked for a telephone jeton.”

  “You don’t know whom he rang up?”

  “No. When he came back it was only to leave again straight away.”

  “In which direction?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  As a reporter was coming in, the patron asked Maigret in an undertone:

  “Is it all right to talk about it?”

  Maigret shrugged. There was no point in making mysteries, now that the cobbler was in the know.

  “If you want to.”

  When he entered Lucas’s office, the latter was coping with two telephones, and Maigret had to wait quite a while.

  “I’m still hunting for the countess,” sighed the sergeant, mopping his forehead. “The Wagons-Lits Company, who know her quite well, haven’t seen her on any of their lines for several months. I’ve had most of the big hotels at Cannes, Nice, Antibes and Villefranche on the line. Nothing doing. I’ve also rung the casinos, where she hasn’t set foot. Lapointe, who speaks English, is telephoning Scotland Yard at this moment, and someone or other is taking care of the Italians.”

  Before going in to see Judge Dossin, Maigret went upstairs to have a word with Moers and return the useless photographs.

  “No results?” asked poor Moers.

  “One out of three, that’s not bad; now we only have to round up the other two, but it’s possible that they’ve never been through an identification check.”

  At noon, they were still not on the track of Countess Panetti, and two Italian journalists who had been tipped off were waiting, greatly excited, outside the door to Maigret’s office.

  7

  Madame Maigret had been rather surprised when on Saturday, about three o’clock, her husband had telephoned to find out whether dinner was cooking.

  “Not yet. Why? . . . Yes, of course I’d like to. If you’re sure you’ll be free. Quite sure? All right. I’ll get dressed. I’ll be there. Near the clock, yes. No, no sauerkraut for me, but I’d love a potée lorraine. What? You’re not joking, are you? Are you serious, Maigret? Anywhere I like? That’s too good to be true, and I feel sure you’re going to ring again in an hour to tell me you won’t be home to dinner or till morning. Oh well! I’ll get ready anyway.”

  So that instead of smelling of cooking, that Saturday, the flat on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir had smelled of bath water, eau-de-cologne, and the sweetish scent which Madame Maigret kept for special occasions.

  Maigret was at the meeting place almost on time, within five minutes, at the Alsatian restaurant in the rue d’Enghien where they had sometimes been to have dinner, and, relaxed, with the air of thinking about the same things as other men, he had eaten sauerkraut prepared just the way he liked it.

  “Have you decided on the cinema?”

  Because, and this was what had made Madame Maigret so incredulous just now on the telephone, he had invited her to spend the evening at any cinema she chose.

  They went to the Paramount on the boulevard des Italiens, and the chief inspector queued up for the tickets without grumbling, emptied his pipe in an enormous spittoon as they went in.

  They heard the electric organ, saw the orchestra emerge from the floor on a platform while a curtain transformed itself into a sort of synthetic sunset. It was not until after the cartoons that Madame Maigret understood. The trailer of the next film had just been shown, then some short reels advertising some kind of sweet snack and furniture on hire-purchase.

  The Prefecture of Police informs us . . .

  It was the first time she had seen this announcement on the screen, and immediately afterward an identification photograph was projected, first full face, then in profile, showing Alfred Moss, whose successive aliases were listed.

  Anybody having met this man in the course of the last two months is requested to telephone immediately . . .

  “So that was it?” she said, out in the street again, while they were going part of the way home on foot in order to get some fresh air.

  “That wasn’t the only reason. The idea, by the way, isn’t mine. It was suggested to the prefect ages ago, but there had never been an opportunity to try it out until now. Moers had noticed that photographs published in the papers are always more or less distorted because of the halftone screen and the inking. Film projection, on the other hand, by enlarging the smallest characteristics, makes a more striking impression.”

  “Anyway, whether that was the reason or not, it turned out nicely for me. How long is it since we did this?”

  “Three weeks?” he suggested in all sincerity.

  “Exactly two and a half months!”

  They bickered a bit, in fun. And next morning, because of the sun, which was again brilliant and springlike, Maigret had sung in his bath. He had walked all the way to the Quai, through the almost-deserted streets, and it was always a pleasure to find the wide corridors of Police Headquarters with their doors standing open on vacant offices.

  Lucas had only just arrived. Torrence was there too, as was Janvier; it wasn’t long before little Lapointe appeared, but because it was Sunday they seemed to be working like amateurs. Perhaps also because it was Sunday, they left the communicating doors open, and from time to time, by way of music, they heard the bells of the local churches.

  Lapointe had been the only one to bring in any new information. The previous night, before leaving, Maigret had asked him:

  “By the way, where does that young journalist live who’s carrying on with your sister?”

  “He’s stopped going out with her. You mean Antoine Bizard.”

  “They’ve broken up?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve scared him?”

  “I’d like his address.”

  “I don’t know it. I know where he eats most of his meals and I doubt that my sister knows any more. I’ll inquire from the newspaper offices.”

  As he entered, he handed a slip of paper to Maigret. This was the address in question, rue Bergère, in the same block as Philippe Liotard.

  “That’s fine, son. Thanks,” the chief inspector had simply said, without adding any comment.

  If it had been a bit warmer, he would have taken off his coat just for the sake of being in his shirtsleeves like people who potter around all day on Sunday, for pottering around was just what he felt like. All his pipes were lined up on his desk, and he had taken out of his pocket his fat black notebook that he always stuffed full of notes but practically never consulted.

  Two or three times he had thrown into the wastepaper basket the big sheets on which he had scribbled. Ruled a set of columns to start with. Then changed his mind.

  In the end his work had taken a turn for the better.

  Thursday, February 15—Countess Pa
netti, accompanied by her maid, Gloria Lotti, leaves Claridge’s in the chocolate-colored Chrysler of her son-in-law Krynker.

  The date had been confirmed by the daytime hall porter. As for the car, the information had been furnished by one of the hotel carmen who had reported the time of departure as seven o’clock at night. He had added that the old lady seemed worried and that her son-in-law was hurrying her as if they were about to miss a train or an important appointment.

  Still no trace of the countess. He went into Lucas’s office to make sure; the sergeant was still receiving reports from all over the place.

  The Italian journalists, the night before, had obtained only a few scraps of information from the police, had furnished a few themselves; they did in fact know Countess Panetti. The marriage of her only daughter, Bella, had caused a big stir in Italy, because, lacking her mother’s consent, the girl had run away from home to get married at Monte Carlo.

  That was five years ago, and since then the two women refused to meet.

  If Krynker was in Paris, said the Italian journalists, it was probably to attempt another reconciliation.

  Friday, February 16—Gloria Lotti, who is wearing the countess’s white hat, goes to Concarneau, from where she sends a telegram to Fernande Steuvels and from where she returns the same night without having met anyone.

  In the margin Maigret had amused himself by drawing a woman’s hat with a tiny veil.

  Saturday, February 17—at noon Fernande leaves the rue de Turenne and departs for Concarneau. Her husband does not accompany her to the station. About four o’clock a customer comes to call for some work he has commissioned and finds Frans Steuvels in his workshop where nothing seems out of the ordinary. Asked about the suitcase, he doesn’t remember having seen it.

  At a few minutes past eight, three persons, among them Alfred Moss and probably the man who is later to register in the rue Lepic under the name of Levine, are taken by taxi from the Gare Saint-Lazare to the corner of the rue de Turenne and the rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

  The concierge hears knocking at Steuvels’s door just before nine o’clock. She has the impression that the three men entered.